In this BPO Corner:
Training Future Workers of Call Centers
By Frank Cimatu, PDI Northern Luzon Bureau
Inquirer News Service

BAGUIO CITY—The two classes, interestingly known as "Massachusetts" and "Washington," started playing the pattong or the Igorot gongs as some of them danced the tadek or the Abra courtship dance. They even had a fashion show of country western outfit.

But when it was time for them to talk, they spoke in American English, in an accent nearing what is known in the call center industry as the Holy Grail: the neutral accent.

"Massachusetts" and "Washington" comprise the first graduates of "Training cum Employment Scheme" or Traces, the first school specifically aimed at creating manpower for the sunrise call center industry.

Traces has the Baguio City government, Baguio Representative Mauricio Domogan, Department of Labor and Employment, Technical Education and Skills Development Authority and ClientLogic, the only call center facility in the city, subsidizing the education of the future call center agents.

Informatics Philippines won the bid to handle Traces, and the Baguio branch is the pilot site for the soon-to-be-nationwide program.

The Cordillera Information and Communication Technology Connection (Citcon) acts as the course evaluator.

The successful applicants are required to pay P 1,000 for the program which typically costs P 20,000. The government subsidizes part of it while ClientLogic is expected to pay the program for every call center applicant it gets from the program.

Baguio Mayor Braulio Yaranon said that they were very willing to shell out money for the program and he considered this as part of the city's job generation project.

"Massachusetts" and "Washington" enrollees number 190 and Traces is aiming for 3,000 trainees in Cordillera in a year.

According to Cynthia Maslian, Traces program manager, the program is a "short-term intervention program for potential call center agents."

Most of the first graduates come from Abra, Kalinga and Mountain Province.

April Tuban, 27, of Tabuk, Kalinga, says she heard the announcement from a government station in her hometown.

A management graduate, Tuban was among the thousand who applied and among the first who made it.
The applicants' ages range from 18-45 years old. The minimum education requirement is two years college but most are college graduates.

The typical Traces program is eight hours a day for 26 days or a total of 206 hours. Tuban had to stay with a cousin throughout the training which started on Sept. 17 and ended on Oct. 21.

Maslian says most of their training involves communication and technical skills.

Tuban says the technical skills she learned included Internet protocol, programming and troubleshooting. She says they worked in shifts to simulate the American-time schedule of a typical Filipino call center.

"We have accent trainers who teach them conversational English. We don't need to teach them slang, we know more American slang here in the Cordillera than the typical American," Maslian says.

"Because of the many varied accents in the US, we are teaching them the neutral accent although there is no such thing," she adds.

As to why there were more graduates, at least in the first class, from the central Cordillera, Gids Omero of Citcon says this was due to the American influence in the region.

"We see more Cordillerans applying as call center agents because they already can speak and sometimes think as an American," Omero says.

Maslian, however, says the most crucial part of the training was to give the applicants the confidence to speak English.

Informatics Baguio had to recruit director and thespian Behn Cervantes for the confidence-building exercises.

Tuban says they were encouraged to speak to each other in English within the campus to familiarize themselves with the language.

She says she would wait for a month after graduation for her call from ClientLogic. The US-based call center, which is the first to move out of Manila with the establishment of their center at the Baguio Economic Zone last year, has the right of first refusal for the Traces graduates.

Maslian says they are getting calls from other call centers in Manila asking for their graduates.

According to the US-based research firm Datamonitor, there would be as much as 22,000 additional call center agent positions through 2009.

Other sources even say that the Philippines will surpass India by 2008 as home to the world's largest call center industry.

The XMG Inc., a Manila-based research and advisory firm, says the industry would generate $3 billion in revenues by 2008.

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This article was originally published in Inq7.net on October 30, 2005
Reprinted with permission.